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Maths skills are not only of significance in the labour market, they are important for all of us in our everyday lives. Yet around a third of young people do not obtain a standard pass in GCSE maths (provisional figures from the Department of Education show 65 per cent of pupils achieved grades 9-4 in 2018). While improving maths skills is a focus for all phases of the education system, recent years have seen growing recognition of the role primary school maths education can play.

In recent years there has been growing concern about the number of young people failing to make a successful transition from education into employment. Increasingly, this appears to be a structural, rather than cyclical, problem. We see evidence of this from that fact that although youth unemployment in the UK was falling in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it started rising again as early as 2004, long before the general downturn in the economy.

The youth unemployment rate in the UK is now at 16 per cent, nearly four times that of the rest of the working age population. While the youth labour market is particularly susceptible to cyclical fluctuations, there are also structural issues that may not disappear with the return of economic growth as some young people struggle to make a successful transition from school into work. We estimate that roughly one in ten young people fall into this category.

The labour market in the UK has shown itself to be remarkably resilient in recent years. Despite the economy shrinking by more than 7 per cent from its pre-recession peak and still being some way from a full recovery (latest NIESR estimates put the current shortfall at 2.7 per cent), the effect on unemployment has been relatively muted. In part, this is a reflection of the flexibility of the UK labour market, with levels of employment maintained by workers accepting lower wages or working fewer hours.